'Fix fate: Free will' is the
seeming paradox at the heart of existence. Man has freedom of choice, but once
the choice has been made, he cannot control the consequences. As we sow, so
shall we reap. Is even the act of choice no real choice at all but an item of
unalterable predestination? Is, then, 'free will' itself a delusion?
Man's hopes and longings build
the journeying wheels
That bear the body of his
destiny
And lead his blind will towards
an unknown goal.
His fate within him shapes his
acts and rules;
Its face and form already are
born in him,
Its parentage is in his secret
soul:...
Nature and Fate compel his
free-will's choice.
Free will is a misnomer, then;
yet this too is not the whole truth about the matter. The wages of sin, we
know, is death; but Grace has limitless powers. By definition the Almighty is
all-mighty; nothing is impossible for him. From the human end things may seem
unalterable; but from the divine end? And where exactly do we draw the line
that separates the human from the divine? Man ordinarily is a slave of
circumstance, a pitiable victim of fate, a creature subject to the curbs of
death, desire and incapacity. But humanity can range from the level of the
near-inconscient to the dizzy heights of the superconscient—from the beast to
the god. Thus it appears that to the adamantine law of fate there can be
exceptions:
But greater spirits this balance can
reverse
And make the soul the artist of its
fate.
Savitri's resolution to keep
faith with Satyavan in defiance of Sage Narad's premonitory forecast of the
coming events is no mere exercise in willfulness but rather the measure of her
own strength which, if put to the supreme test, may very well bend "the
long cosmic curve" itself. But this consciousness of the indwelling power
doesn't blot out the human Savitri, the creature of trembling sensibility, who
has made a willing and total surrender of herself to Satyavan.
Leaving her parental home a second time,
Savitri speeds back to rejoin Satyavan. It is a sharp fundamental passage from
the palace with its "tinged mosaic of the crystal floors" to the bare
hermitage in the bosom of the forest. But affection and infinite consideration
await her here, and so she commences in the wild woods her married life with
Satyavan. This solitude strikes her for a time as the sweetest society:
There was a chanting in the casual wind,
There was a glory in the least sunbeam;
Night was a chrysoprase on velvet cloth,
A nestling darkness or a moonlit deep;
Day was a purple pageant and a hymn,
A wave of the laughter of light from morn
to eve.
Can love with its divine accent
and 'sex' with its human base ever fuse into the 'holy' wedded state? Before
their 'fall', did Adam and Eve experience what C.S. Lewis has called 'paradisal
sexuality'? John Keats could not imagine any mingling of 'goatish winnyish
lustful love with the abstract adoration of the deity'. But nothing is
impossible to the "greater spirits" who are called into being to
enact the higher synthesis. The first realisations of the wedded life of
Savitri and Satyavan are of this order:
A fusing of the joys of earth and heaven,
A tremulous blaze of nuptial rapture
passed,
A rushing of two spirits to be one,
A burning of two bodies in one flame…
The woman at no time is less
than woman merely because she is also potentially divine.
It is doubtless an intolerable situation
for Savitri. She alone has the foreknowledge which Narad has communicated to
her; Satyavan, his revered parents, the other inmates of the hermitage, all are
spared the knowledge that continually lacerates her. She cannot share her pain,
she musn't even give the remotest hint of it. Can she at least try to forget?
She tries desperately, she tries to lose herself in love's divine frenzy:
Vainly she fled into abysms of
bliss
From her pursuing foresight of
the end.
The more she plunged into love
that anguish grew;
Her deepest grief from sweetest
gulfs arose.
Remembrance was a poignant pang,
she felt
Each day a golden leaf torn
cruelly out
From her too slender book of
love and joy.
Vain is her attempt—vain are all
her attempts—to escape the pain in her heart that is like her own inseparable
shadow. Her life with Satyavan, although it is the very image of love's
complete fulfilment, is for her now more and more a mask. Nor love's maddening
excesses nor the minutiae of an ardent housewife's round of duties are an
effective cure for the wound in her heart that she cannot bare to others, not
even to her soul's mate, dear Satyavan. She brings more and more concentration
into her routine movements, achieving thereby,
A oneness with earth's glowing
robe of light,
A lifting up of common acts by
love.
From her actions flow peace and
joy to others, and to her too, because others are happy; yet the void within
remains, the space of the allotted year contracts, the tread of remorseless
Time approaches. In a new frenzy of alarm she rushes to Satyavan's arms again:
Intolerant of the poverty of Time
Her passion catching at the fugitive
hours
Willed the expense of centuries in one
day
Of prodigal love and the surf of ecstasy;
Has Satyavan no hint of this
hell that is hidden in her heart? Doesn't love give him a sixth window of sense
to see the spectre she fain would hide? She will not tell him, she cannot tell
him, yet he knows, however obscurely, that something, somewhere, somehow is
wrong:
Satyavan sometimes half understood,
Or felt at least with the uncertain
answer
Of our thought-blinded hearts the
unuttered need,
The unplumbed abyss of her deep
passionate want.
But the barrier of reticence
remains. For his part, he readily, eagerly, gives her as much of his time as he
can—still rushing to her from the forest after hewing wood or from attendance
on his sightless father.
Retired to the still secrecy of her
heart, Savitri ponders whether, when the trial is upon her at last, she must
not immolate herself and follow Satyavan "into the sweet or terrible
Beyond". What would happen, then, to "those sad parents",
Satyavan's mother and blind father? Who will "help the empty remnant of
their day"? Nay more: the burden of the whole world's pain presses on
Savitri, for in her own pain she recognises the world's as well. She is now
like,
.. .a dumb priest with hidden gods
Unappeased by the wordless offering of
her days,
Lifting to them her sorrow like
frankincense,
Her life the altar, herself the
sacrifice.
The sole year of permitted bliss
now draws to a close. Like a jungle crouching in silence, Savitri waits in
sombre expectancy.
(An excerpt from “Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri – A study of
the cosmic epic”, Dr. Premanandakumar, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, Puducherry)
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